Congress has access to IVF. Military families like mine do not.

Editor’s note: The views expressed in this op-ed are solely the author’s and do not reflect the official positions or policies of the U.S. government or the Department of Defense. The United States asks military families like mine to accept a lot: deployments, repeated moves, long separations and lives built around the needs of the service. It should not deny us the medical care we need to have children. TRICARE, the health insurance program for our nation’s service members and their families, refuses to cover in vitro fertilization in most cases, denying service members the tools they need to start a family. Congress has not yet fixed this failure, but it can now. As lawmakers consider this year’s defense bill, they have another opportunity to expand IVF coverage. They have come close before: Last year, both chambers included IVF coverage in their versions of the bill, only to drop it from the final legislation. For my family, those decisions have real consequences.

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